


Living In Twilight

by roachpatrol



Category: Homestuck, Oregon Trail (Video Game), Organ Trail
Genre: Gen, Zombies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-23
Updated: 2012-05-23
Packaged: 2017-11-05 21:17:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roachpatrol/pseuds/roachpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“No more fuel,” you say. “The rocket board’s clean out, we’ll never make it to Oregon. We’ll never make it to the nearest Burger King.”</p>
<p>“There are these amazing inventions called feet, city boy,” Rose says. “I suggest you upgrade.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Living In Twilight

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Edoro for the beta! 
> 
> This is a crossover with Organ Trail, the post-apocalyptic zombie version of the Oregon Trail educational game. 
> 
> It's also educational. 
> 
> *
> 
>  
> 
> __
> 
>  
> 
> _You look darkly on the day  
>  With memories to light your way  
> A little sad but it's all right  
> We are always living in twilight  
> _  
> \--The Weepies, 'Living In Twilight'.

*

TG: lalonde  
TG: did it happen to you too  
TG: i mean  
TG: did it unhappen i guess  
TT: You are referring to our sudden disempowerment, I take it?  
TG: our  
TG: oh thank fuck  
TT: I’ve already talked to Jade. She can’t teleport anymore.  
TG: christ is she stranded somewhere  
TT: Just her home island. And not terribly pleased by it, either.  
TG: well still at least thats some kind of small mercy  
TG: shell be safe for a while right at least shes not stuck in bombay or nebraska or with you or anything  
TT: Yes, the terrible threat of upstate New York is indeed mitigated by her distance from my dread and piney clutches.  
TG: what about john  
TG: i tried to ask him but hes not on  
TT: Dave, it’s six in the morning where he is. Calm down.  
TG: im calm  
TG: im chill  
TG: if i were any chiller this polar bear thats sucking my dick would stick to it like a little kid with a stop sign or a lamppost or whatever it is that ornery prepubescent midgets stick to in the winter  
TT: I am now entirely convinced that you are not freaking out.  
TG: well good  
TG: cause im not  
TT: It will all be fine, Dave. It’s entirely possible this is a good thing.  
TG: what  
TT: If our powers are gone, perhaps that means that the last lingering vestiges of the Game that bestowed them upon us is gone too?  
TT: Perhaps we’re free.  
TG: but i liked my powers  
TT: Yeah.  
TT: Me too.

*

“Zombies,” your Bro says, dropping heavily over the back of the futon. 

“What?”

“Zombies, l’il bro.” He takes your game controller away and changes the TV to the news. You weren’t even playing, really, you were just staring at the game timer and trying not to flip your shit. On the news, grainy footage plays constantly, this gray-skinned shambling monstrosity suddenly _lunging_ out from behind a door, long yellow teeth sinking into some news reporter’s neck, pulling her down and biting and biting--

The third time the footage loops, you realize the zombie is the President. 

_Was_ the President.

“Fuck,” you say. Your voice comes out slightly too high. “ _Fuck_ , Bro.”

“No doubt.”

“What do we do?”

Your Bro stares at the tv for a long time. He’s tense all over, one of his fingers going _taptaptap_ on the game controller. He looks like maybe he’s not quite as cool as he wants to be.

“I don’t know,” he says eventually.

You watch the footage loop again.

*

Things you need: water, food. Weapons. 

Things you have: seventy-three shitty swords, two bottles of apple juice, a case of Orange Crush, and a frozen pizza. Plumbing still works, but the water that comes out of the kitchen sink tastes like arsenic and dirty pennies and on TV they’re talking about _no known route of infection_ , and you don’t know what’s safe anymore.

“Why the fuck didn’t you go shopping any time this century?” you hiss, digging rainbow mountains of supple puppet ass from beneath the kitchen sink. “‘Oh, don’t stress, it’s cool,’ you said, ‘it’ll be alright, dog, cool it, l’il man, I’ll go tomorrow, I got things to do, you know how it is, dude, it’ll be _just fucking fine!_ ’”

“Chill, Dave,” your Bro says, pacing back and forth in front of the living room window. You can hear screaming, more and more with each hour as the sun rises. 

“I’m totally fucking chill,” you snap. “Any chiller and I’d be giving your pasty ass frostbite.” 

For good measure, you throw a vibrating felt dildo at his head. It bounces off his hat with a sad squeak, which might be irony or it might be he’s so distracted looking at whatever is happening on the streets below. 

“The roof,” he says. “My board.”

You don’t know if it’ll take you both. 

“Where would we even go?” you ask.

He shakes his head. “Away, man, I don’t know. Out of here. You know cities aren’t safe in a situation like this.”

“I know, I know. We’ll go find a mountain or something, wait it out, right? Can’t be too long til the government gets its shit together.” 

“Sounds like a plan, l’il man.”

You find a box of protein bars under all the puppet ass, mint chocolate and peanut butter, and another box of cherry bombs. 

“Well, if the zombies are vulnerable to cheapass fireworks we’re totally great,” you say. You try to stick them in your sylladex but they just fall limply to the floor-- your whole captchalogue system has been out of commission since your time powers shut off, too. You didn’t know if it was connected but it’s starting to feel like it’s all part of something, part of this bizarre horrorflick clusterfuck that’s taken over your life. 

You can’t feel time, you can’t _feel_ it, and you can’t even feel what you can’t feel. It’s not even like missing a limb, not even an amputation. Whatever it was that you used to be able to do has just been completely erased, as if you’ve woken up from a dream of flying and of course you don’t have wings now, of course there’s nothing even left to miss. The future is completely impenetrable, and the past is a vague blur. Your heart counts out sloppy fractions of seconds, each tick sliced and diced too fast for your brain to even make any kind of sense of. Time was your tapestry, time was your _bitch_ , and now there’s just nothing.

You feel so achingly vulnerable. 

Bro hits you in the back of the head with a backpack. 

“Chill,” he says. “We got this, okay?”

You take a deep breath. “Okay.”

*

The two of you haul ass up the stairwell, your swords flashing in the dusty light and behind you the gnarly horde of undead. They make the most grating, terrible moaning noises and it sets your teeth to itching. The imps in the Game just snickered, predatory growly little giggles like a cartoon version of evil. This isn’t so much evil as profoundly wrong, and you think no amount of fresh jams are going to scrub your ears clean. 

“Take this, l’il man,” your Bro pants, shoving the board under your arm. “I’m gonna dual wield.”

You turn, stumbling a little over the steps, the board still too big to hold comfortably. Your arms are too short. 

“No, man--” you say, try to shove it back at him, but he’s busy, slicing, dicing, unhealthy gray flesh cleaving beneath his blade as he _goes back down the stairs_ , “--we’re going to go together!”

“Get to Lalonde’s, bro,” he says. “If anyone can fix this--” 

Long terrible teeth sink into his throat, and his katana clatters to the stairs, and that is the end of him. It’s not even as elegant as the first time you faced down his death. There’s no neat sword-blow through the sternum, crucifying him into something terrible and meaningful, there’s no justice or injustice, there’s no _point_. 

The monsters that killed him simply start to eat him, turning the man you called your brother into just so many big awful red-purple hunks of meat, and when one zombie breaks off from the rest of the crowd you turn and run. 

When you hit the sunlight of the roof you slide the board under your knees and launch off into the air. The wind is hot and smells of ash and burning, and you can’t even pretend that it’s what’s making your tear up.

*

EB: so dave made it?  
TT: Narrowly. But we’re both fine.  
EB: man, i dunno what kind of definition of fine you’re both using but i am just going to have to assume it’s some magical strider-lalonde kind of fine. which must obviously be the finest kind of fine to ever have fined!  
TT: John...  
EB: just  
EB: take care of each other okay? you did before and you can do it again and you’d better get here all in one piece!  
TT: That would take some doing, seeing as Strider and I remain, alas, two distinct entities.

She’s got a watch and you can’t stop checking it. You hadn’t even thought to bring a watch with you, and now just look at you, Knight of Time, how far you’ve fallen, peering over your sister’s shoulder at the little numbers changing _tick tick tick_ like a junkie hanging around for one more hit. 

You try not to ask her too often, not more than every hour or so, but you feel so much safer when she says “It’s two thirty five and seven... eight seconds.”

EB: fine, i will compromise on you guys getting here in two pieces but i absolutely positively draw the line at any additional pieces, they will be totally surplus to your palhoncho’s stringent requirements.  
EB: and that’s an order.  
EB: straight from the top.  
EB: you, dave, two pieces. and give him a hug for me okay?  
TT: Sir, yes sir.  
TT: Two pieces and a hearty round of sexual harassment, coming up.  
EB: kiss his neck and call him buttercup, he will probably explode from the hot yaois.  
TT: I shall do no such thing, I need him to carry all my heavy equipment and open the pickle jars.  
EB: well jeez okay never let it be said an egbert interfered with a lady’s access to pickles.  
TT: And they say chivalry is dead.

“Two forty seven and... nine seconds, Dave, do you just want to wear it?”

Your wrist is out before she can even finish her sentence. One more hit, oh, please, you know you’re good for it. 

She fastens it around your wrist barely one notch wider than she’d worn it. You’re getting too thin. But her fingers are soft and her smile is kind and this is your Seer, your sister; she knows all your broken pieces and forgives you.

The watch is purple, with little rhinestones in the shape of hearts and stars worked around the leather band, overwrought feminine soppiness at its finest, but you can feel the minute tick of the cogs against your skin as it ticks away. 

EB: be safe.  
TT: We will.  
EB: i’ll hate you forever if you don’t get here  
EB: i totally will it will  
EB: go down in history as like  
EB: hottest hate grudge god i don’t even know what i’m saying anymore.  
EB: you just better get here is all i am saying okay the end see you soon.  
TT: John.  
TT: We’ll make it.

“We have to go,” she says, pocketing her PDA, and for thirteen seconds the words don’t actually process. 

“No more fuel,” you say. “The rocket board’s clean out, we’ll never make it to Oregon. We’ll never make it to the nearest Burger King.”

“There are these amazing inventions called feet, city boy,” Rose says. “I suggest you upgrade.”

Rose has camping backpacks. Rose has three shotguns and two pistols and a bottle of rubbing alcohol and five boxes of actually really tasty protein bars and a flashlight and a fluffy pink coat and two sleeping bags and a bunch of lighters and a dead Mom and maps and books on bugs and birds and edible plants and she has this awful icy thousand-yard stare. You have a shitty katana and a watch designed for a prepubescent girl. 

Rose pushes you out the door.

Rose. You have Rose. She leads and you follow and it’s almost a comfort.

You stare at the sweep of the hands as you walk along, devouring this thread-thin connection back to who you’re supposed to be, and Rose touches your elbow gently, every two to three hundred seconds, to keep your feet on the deer path.

*

Rose puts her hand on your chest, one night, points off in the distance. 

There’s a light in the forest. Other travelers. Supplies, maybe, a chance to talk to someone who isn’t a monster. Beg for help. Make some new friends. 

Or get your head blown off by dudes who’ve gotten every bit as twitchy and worn-out as you two. 

You look at Rose, and she looks at you. You raise an eyebrow and she tilts her head, an (in?) assent, falls in behind you. Somewhere around Illinois the two of you just kind of stopped needing to actually say any words.

It’s a camp, a little circle of huddled people around a fire. They’ve got a pot of something going over it and it smells amazing. 

They’ve got a guy with a rifle, and he raises it, fiercely, up to his shoulder. They’ve got a rifle and enough ammo to spare. The two of you have gotten quiet, but not quiet enough that he doesn’t hear you coming. 

You stumble to a halt, put yourself in front of Rose. By now all the pride’s been worn right off her. She lets you.

“Yo,” you say, and put your non-sword hand out. You wave. “Peace.”

He doesn’t lower the gun. Behind him the gang of people just look at you, their faces like tired, ugly masks. Six of them, six other people -- how did they get so far with so many of them? 

“We came to say hi,” you mumble. You haven’t talked in so long. Days. It feels weird. 

“Hi,” one of the gang says, and another few of them laugh kind of tiredly. Darkly. They’re looking at your sword. 

“We, uh. This. I’m Dave,” you say. “She’s Rose.”

“Charmed,” Rose says, from around your shoulder. 

The man with the gun sighs, explosively, and rubs at his stubble, a small gritty little noise, but he still doesn’t lower the gun. 

“Dave,” he says, and he sounds kinda sad. “How old’re you, Dave?”

“Seventeen,” you say. 

“Seventeen,” he repeats. “Christ. And your friend?”

“Same,” Rose says. 

“Christ,” he repeats. “Shouldn’t have asked.”

“Don’t,” one of the gang by the fire says. “Come on, Jim, don’t. They’re just kids. Send ‘em off.”

He looks at the two of you, a long measuring look.

“The girl,” he says. 

“The girl,” one of the gang agrees, and there’s a nasty rumble from the rest of them. 

Rose makes a sharp furious hiss, and takes a step back. One or two of them start to rise to their feet, slowly, and knives glint in the firelight, and you notice that every one of them is male. 

“Oh, fuck no,” you say, kind of stupidly, and the guy with the rifle aims it at your heart. 

“Dave, run!” Rose shouts, and wrenches your arm just as the gun goes off. 

You stagger to the side, and the bullet rips along your ribs instead of right through your chest.  
You shake free of Rose for just a second, and drive your sword right through rifle-guy’s neck.  
Then she grabs you again, and you run. 

*

You’re cold all the time now, the infection setting in hard, too many days on the road pushing you to your limit. The world is turning towards autumn, frosting the grass in the mornings, turning the trees gold as Prospit and red as LOHAC but there’s no warmth or light anywhere. You’re too far north. The sky is a hostile gray thing and rains and rains and rains. 

At least it keeps the flies down. 

The two of you trudge on, step by soggy step, hitched together by your shaking arms, a team of dying mules pulling along an invisible wagon of exhausted determination. Rose is just as cold as you are, and when she’s wet it makes her thin pale hair cling to your shoulder, but it’s better than being apart. 

You think you must be in Oregon now. You must at least be close. The landscape is endless fields and forests and rain, wind and shade, marshes. The maps turned useless with mildew and mold as your brains turned useless with sickness and fatigue, and you left them long behind. 

You eat snails, cold as slime icecubes, bitter and unsatisfying. There’re snails fucking everywhere. But it doesn’t help. 

It gets harder and harder to make a fire at night. All the wood is wet. When you do manage it you press in so close that the sparks prick black stars into your skin, paint you grimdark with smoke but it just hurts, the heat never goes any farther into you than your skin. As infection and exhaustion eat away at your mind you lose the knack, give up entirely. When it’s too much to bear you lie down with Rose wherever you can, in ditches and beside fallen tree trunks. You huddle together and shake. After a while everything’s equally hard to bear, and you stop bothering with that, too, with lying down, with the useless ritual agony of stopping and getting up again. 

You just walk, one numb freezing foot after the other. You can sleep when you get to Oregon for real.

Your hands jitter with illness and cold too hard to hold your sword on your own, anymore. Rose helped tie your fist around the hilt with a strip of cloth, before her own hands got gnarled up into brittle claws, and now the blade is just another part of you, numb and shaking, dragging point-down along the road behind you. 

You can still kill with it, when you have to, but the zombies are few and far between anymore and they don’t bother you guys much at all. 

You’re so cold.

*

You’ve reached it. You’ve made it. The walls of Safe Haven rise up above you, high and pure and white. You push aside the huddled masses that mill and moan below the battlements, you push your own ragged bodies against the barred doors. 

Rose paws at you, sharp and sudden, and you look at her. 

_John_ she mouths. Her black-clawed hands make typing motions. 

As time went on and all your batteries dropped it got reserved for checking in every other day and then every other week and then finally just an agreement. You’d use it when you were there. Were here. Oregon. Safe.

Rose holds it in her useless twisted fingers and you peck out the letters, bit by bit, the clawed yellow nail of your thumb. It takes everything you got to keep it together. Words are a foreign concept anymore, an uphill battle. You left them behind with the snails.

TT: john  
EB: rose! are you here yet?  
EB: is everything okay?  
TT: we  
TT: are  
TT: here  
EB: oh my god!

Then Rose drops the PDA, fumbles it, and moans in frustration when it hits the ground. You’re not sure if either of you can pick it up.

_John_ , she mouths soundlessly, rocking back and forth in the circle of your arms. _John john john_. 

For an endless while, nothing happens. You hold each other and stand there and just exist.

You’re so tired. 

And so cold. 

And so hungry. 

Inside Safe Haven is warmth and people and food and John. John will save you and feed you and you can rest and John is here and he will save you. 

“Rose?” John calls, “Dave?” and the two of you look up. He’s leaning over the edge of the wall, staring down at the huddled masses of you and the rest of everyone. 

“Oh god,” he says, and puts his hand over his mouth. His eyes are wide, wide as the sky, wide and bright and you are so hungry. 

_John_ Rose says with her empty pit of a mouth. _John john john john_.

“John,” you say. You have just barely enough face left to say it with, and it comes out a twisted, guttural moan. 

“Oh god,” John sobs, collapsing down on his elbows, “oh god oh god not you guys too--”

“Hungry,” you say. “Please-- John-- bro--”

John is crying. Some one else comes up to the wall, puts their hand on his shoulder, some stranger is touching John and you came all this way and you are so tired and so hungry and so angry. You scream, you hold Rose close and you scream and you scream and you _scream_.

John pulls something off his back. It’s a rifle, and he points it at you. 

“I’m so sorry,” he sobs. “I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry--”

He’s John, and he’s warmth and light and safety and food and you’re so hungry and so cold and he supposed to be _saving_ you.

“I’m so sorry,” he sobs, and sights down the barrel. 

Everything goes dark.

*

You wake slowly, swimming through hot layers of confusion and desperate pain. When you finally open your eyes it is to your bedroom, and a pillow soaked in snot and tears. 

Another Dave sits down by your head, a box of kleenex in one hand and a bottle of applejuice in the other. 

“I didn’t piss in it,” he says. 

“God yes,” you say, and chug the thing. The other Dave’s hand is steady against your face, cleaning away the tears, and you can read him again: ten minutes futureward of yourself. Stable. 

“What the fuck just happened?” you ask. The agony of the nightmare is already fading. In the golden morning light you can’t quite wrap your brain around it. Blood and flies and Rose’s desperate eyes filmed pale with rot--

Future Dave shrugs. 

“Time went a little funky for a while,” he says. “I don’t know. I guess I’ll try to check it out later today, bug Jade about it.”

Your computer dings. 

You pull yourself out of bed, stagger on weirdly wobbly knees off to peer at the monitor. Future Dave finishes off the dregs of his apple juice, unconcerned with messages he’d already read.

TT: Dave.  
TT: Did anything weird happen last night?  
TG: i dont think so  
TG: but i don’t think not  
TG: if that makes any sense  
TT: As much as you ever make.  
TG: yeah love you too lalonde  
TT: Oh, but whatever will our houses have to say regarding so forbidden a match?  
TG: no  
TG: i mean  
TG: i love you  
TG: you know that right  
TT: Of course I do, you emotionally constipated imbecile.  
TT: It would not be the most inaccurate statement either to have it put into text  
TT: that  
TT: for my part of this relationship’s arcane equations  
TT: I don’t find you completely objectionable as a paradoxically fabricated genetic relation  
TT: or a friend  
TT: or a brother.

She signs off. Nothing gets her bolting for her atheist’s foxhole faster than a flash of real sincerity. But some part of yourself feels better, for having had that out in the open.

You look back at the bed. Future Dave has curled up under the covers, apparently taking over the coveted title of Present Dave, and has gone back to sleep. 

You close your own eyes, unaccountably nervous, and stretch out your hands. Time curls into your fingertips, warm and eager and endless, pulsing with the rhythm of your blood. 

You drop back into the past to pay yourself a visit. 

*

A video makes the rounds of the internet for a while, going viral, leaking out onto the analogue newsfeeds, grey-templed paternal anchors over-explaining the wrong aspects and their plasticine lady sycophants mugging along in concern. 

The little snips they show on newsfeeds and shallow aggregate blogs are only about ten, fifteen seconds of a pretty girl crying, her arms streaked red-black, and a blurry gray flash of something big with teeth. The whole video that you can see on youtube or download pretty much anywhere, well, that video tops out at an hour and a half, badly edited, grainy, no pacing, sound quality like satan took a shit in a speaker. Some crummy old Nikon camcorder, lurching and blurry, hissing and color-muted and towards the end cracked in one spot, blurring half the screen into rainbows. 

The plot is simple enough to come through all the shitty filming and editing, and there’s a lot of discussion over how much of any particular aspect is intention, if it’s ironic, or subtle genius, or just plain dumb.

The plot is: Five kids try to get from Washington D.C to Safe Haven, Oregon, during a zombie apocalypse. 

Only one of them makes it. 

The camera quality’s too shit to judge the zombies -- costumes, digital aftereffects, it’s impossible to tell. It’s convincing. Five minutes of film time is three zombies tearing apart a cat, eating it bit by bit. Another three minutes is the zombies tearing apart one of the kids, but it’s the cat part that gets everyone, the cat part that gets the owner of the video in trouble with the cops and the media and the internet, that awful little question: did these kids really film themselves tearing apart a real cat, just to make a better video?

Was it a fake cat, or what?

“It was real,” the kid that made the video says at the end of the video. “It was all real,” she says, fiercely, sitting in her bedroom, talking to her webcam. Picture quality’s sharp again, steady. Her bedroom’s painted pink, unicorn posters on the wall. The bear she’s clutching to her chest is the same bear in the video she carried the whole way through, one of those girly back-pack bears, and it’s clean again, the purple fur fluffy under her constantly twitching fingers.

She’s maybe sixteen, all skinny arms and bony shoulders and if her face is still teenage-round her eyes are so, so old. 

“They ate my friends,” she says. “They were my friends and they got eaten, and I’m the only one left.” 

She starts to cry, burying her face in the purple bear.

“The Game ate my friends,” she cries, and you can hear the capital G. It goes through you like a sword. She sobs, “We didn’t win and it ate my friends and it was all supposed to be okay and everyone’s back except my _fucking_ friends. It ate them, it ate my friends.”

The four people she lists as friends never existed, say the news anchors, and mug dramatically for the cameras. Their waxy, magazine-glossy news anchorettes widen their eyes and purse their glossy maws and look just so terribly concerned. Did she really kill that cat?

What a terrible joke for a girl to pull. What an awful tragedy for a girl to be so crazy. 

Whichever. Whatever. 

Next up: asbestos, the silent killer. 

*

A petition is sent up to the Federal Trade Commission, to spend some money investigating what, if any, the consequences of those new Real Games might be, and to halt production on any future games until the study proves them as harmless as their manufacturers claim them to be. It’s backed by thirty million signatures and the Pevensie Foundation. 

It’s opposed by countless corporations, from Hasbro to Microsoft to Coca-Cola. 

The petition fails. 

*

EB: dave, are you there!?  
EB: dave, you really need to be there, we have to talk!!  
TG: who the fuck are you  
EB: oh my god.


End file.
